Experts gather to explore Voyage of St. Brendan

Now, more than a thousand years after it was first written, the story of Saint Brendan has been brought to life again for a new audience. After more than 60 years of work, the original 9th century Latin account of the legendary voyager's life has been translated into English. And later this morning, scholars will discuss it at a symposium in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. And joining us now is Professor David Stifter from the Institute's School of Celtic Studies. Good morning, David. You're welcome to the programme. Most people will know a little bit about Saint Brendan, but maybe not a lot about him. Who was he and tell us about his significance.

Well, he was a sixth century saint. We know that he lived and he's considered to be one of the 12 Apostles of Ireland. So he's among the most important saints and still most popular saints of Ireland. But he's best known for his travels. We know that historically he undertook several sea voyages to Iona, to Wales, allegedly also to Brittany. But what he's best known for is this legendary trip or voyage over the Atlantic, which he took for seven years in search of. of the so-called land of promise of the saints.

And the legend goes that he visited or discovered America, but did that actually happen? No, that's a legend, that's

a modern interpretation. There's nothing in the tale itself that would lead us to believe that in the first place. But we know that he's traveling or that Irish monks were traveling in the North Atlantic in the pre-Viking era. And so some people think that maybe somebody got drifted off to America, but there's no evidence for this

at all. Why were they undertaking these voyages? What were they trying to discover?

Well, they didn't want to discover anything. They wanted to get away from society. They wanted to be alone. They wanted to be hermits.

Tell us about this new book then. It's a translation of the original Latin text from the 9th century about Brendan's life. And it took 60 years to complete this

translation. Yes, this book was done by two Italian scholars. Giovanni Orlandi started with the work in the 1960s, and he died in 2007. And his student, now professor in Milan, Rossana Guglielmetti, took up the work, and she published actually two versions of an Italian edition in 2014 and 2017. And this, after 10 years and so after 60 years altogether, we've now finally managed to get an English translation of that book, of the whole edition, with loads of commentary in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. What can we learn from it? Well, for the first time, we have a reliable text, and hopefully this will spread out. Up until now, all the texts were based on wrong readings or on... uh not ideal manuscripts and uh what uh the scholars have uh worked out is what the sources are where where they drew from uh that we don't have to that we can't take that text literal that it's really a mishmash

of literary allusions the book was presented to the u.s president donald trump by our own president katherine connelly during president trump's recent visit do you think he'll read it

I have no reason to doubt that. And we were absolutely delighted when we heard that President